Can websites reveal a firm’s innovativeness? Empirical evidence on Italian manufacturing SMEs

Abstract

[EN] Research in innovation usually builds on conventional data such as balance sheets, surveys, patents, or product catalogs. This paper intends to explore unconventional data, specifically web-scraped data, as an information source for innovation studies, proposing a careful procedure to establish the veracity of the linkage between web-based data and firm-level information retrieved from conventional sources. The study regards a sample of Italian manufacturing small and medium enterprises active in 2016, comprehending both innovative and non-innovative firms. It is based on HTML tags, whilst most of the previous literature worked on the web-pages text and related semantics. Our paper provides evidence that the way HTML language is applied to build a corporate website unveils the capabilities of the owner firm, helping to distinguish innovative from non-innovative SMEs.